How to Offer a Pay-What-You-Want Tip

A pay-what-you-want tip lets a fan type in any amount instead of picking from fixed presets. The strongest setup keeps your existing suggested amounts as quick options and adds an open custom-amount field next to them, so a fan who wants to pay more — or less — than your presets still has a clear way to do it.

FanBell is free to start with no monthly fee and applies a 12% platform fee only when a fan pays (pricing).

This page focuses specifically on the pay-what-you-want mechanic — letting a fan set their own tip amount instead of only choosing from your presets. For getting your very first tip at all, see how to get your first tip online; for writing and testing the presets themselves, see what to put on your tip page to get more tips and how much should suggested tip amounts be.

What does a "pay-what-you-want" tip actually mean?

A pay-what-you-want tip is a tip whose amount the fan types in, rather than one chosen from fixed buttons like $3, $5, or $10. On FanBell, that open custom-amount field sits beside a creator's suggested amounts on the Tips offer rather than replacing them (how it works).

The term comes from pricing research. Kim, Natter and Spann defined pay-what-you-want in the Journal of Marketing in 2009 as a mechanism "whereby consumers have maximum control over the price they pay," up to and including the option to pay nothing at all (Kim, Natter & Spann, Journal of Marketing 2009). Most creator setups are narrower than that academic definition: FanBell's Tips offer pairs the open field with creator-set suggested amounts, and a completed tip requires no reply or delivery from the creator. Presets plus an open field is what most creators mean when they say "pay what you want."

Fixed suggested amounts or pay-what-you-want — which converts better?

Neither format wins outright, and a hybrid usually performs best. Fixed presets speed up the decision for a fan who does not want to think about a number, while an open field lets a highly motivated fan pay more than any preset would have suggested. Most creator tip pages benefit from showing both at once.

Showing a reference number next to an open field has a measurable effect on what people pay. In the delicatessen field study reported by Kim, Natter and Spann, guests who were shown a reference price paid an average of 104% of the seller's regular price, published in the Journal of Marketing in 2009.

FanBell's Tips offer ships as the hybrid model by default: creators set suggested amounts, and fans also see an open field for entering a different number. Choosing "pay-what-you-want" on FanBell therefore means deciding how much weight to give the custom field relative to the presets, not adding a separate product.

Does letting fans name their own price lower what they pay?

No. Field evidence says an open price field does not collapse payments toward zero. In three field studies published in the Journal of Marketing in 2009, Kim, Natter and Spann reported prices paid significantly greater than zero across all three sellers, with consumers paying about 86% of their own internal reference price.

Results split by product rather than collapsing: in the same 2009 Journal of Marketing studies, customers paid 10.62% more than the regular price for hot beverages, 19.37% less for a restaurant buffet lunch, and 28.72% less for cinema tickets (Kim).

"The authors find in three field studies that prices paid are significantly greater than zero." — Ju-Young Kim, Martin Natter & Martin Spann, Pay-What-You-Want: A New Participative Pricing Mechanism, Journal of Marketing (2009)

Averages hide a wide spread, so an open tip field is best read as adding variance rather than guaranteeing generosity — audience relationship and framing still move any individual fan's number. What the 2009 field studies do rule out is the assumption that an open field is automatically a race to the bottom.

How do you turn on a pay-what-you-want tip on FanBell?

There is no separate pay-what-you-want toggle on FanBell: the open custom-amount field is already part of the Tips offer, sitting next to the suggested amounts a creator sets. Turning pay-what-you-want on is therefore a copy-and-emphasis decision — set the suggested amounts, then point fans at the open field.

A practical setup: pick two or three suggested amounts as anchors, write one line of context explaining what a tip supports, and place the link where fans already see it. A Tips request requires no reply or delivery from the creator, so leaving the custom field open costs a creator nothing extra — an open field is an additional way to pay, not additional work.

What's the risk of an unanchored pay-what-you-want tip?

The risk of an unanchored pay-what-you-want tip is not overpayment — it is that a page showing no reference number pushes a large share of visitors toward paying nothing. comScore's tracking of Radiohead's 2007 In Rainbows release, sold with no minimum price, found that 62% of people who downloaded the album paid nothing (comScore, November 2007).

comScore also reported that the 38% of In Rainbows downloaders who did pay paid an average of $6. US downloaders of In Rainbows paid an average of $8.05 against $4.64 for downloaders outside the US, according to comScore figures reported by BBC News in November 2007 (BBC News, 2007).

Radiohead disputed that study: the band's representatives called comScore's figures "wholly inaccurate" and said it was "impossible for outside organisations to have accurate figures," according to BBC News in November 2007. Even discounted, the In Rainbows launch illustrates the pattern worth designing around: a fully open field with no reference point on the page tends to produce more $0 outcomes than one paired with visible suggested amounts. Keeping presets on the page is the practical defense, even when the custom field is the one a creator wants fans to notice.

How small can a tip get before card fees eat it?

A very small pay-what-you-want tip loses an outsized share of its value to fixed card-processing costs. Stripe's published US rate is 2.9% + $0.30 per successful transaction for domestic cards (Stripe pricing), and the flat $0.30 component — not the percentage — is what makes a $1 tip uneconomic while barely denting a $10 one.

Worked example on Stripe's published US rate: a $1 tip carries roughly $0.33 in card processing, close to a third of the payment, while a $5 tip carries roughly $0.45, or under 9%. Those two figures are illustrative math on a published rate rather than a guaranteed cost, and they sit on top of FanBell's 12% platform fee, which applies only once a fan's payment succeeds. Stripe publishes country-specific card pricing, so a creator outside the United States should read the rate listed for their own country rather than assume the US 2.9% + $0.30 figure applies.

There is also a hard floor underneath the economics. Stripe's API reference states that the minimum charge amount is $0.50 US or the equivalent in the charge currency, so a card payment below that cannot be processed at all (Stripe API reference). For both reasons the suggested-amounts guide recommends testing a low preset around $3–$5 rather than $1–$2: a visible low anchor discourages a fan from typing in a fee-eaten $1 when $3 was already on screen.

What copy makes a pay-what-you-want tip actually work?

Copy on a pay-what-you-want tip has one job: give the fan a reason to choose a number above the smallest one visible. In a pay-what-you-want field experiment on amusement-park ride photos, the average amount paid rose from $0.92 to $5.33 when half the payment went to charity, published in PNAS in 2012 (Gneezy, Gneezy, Riener & Nelson, 2012).

Naming a cause raised the amount paid but lowered the purchase rate in that same experiment: 8.39% of riders bought the photo under plain pay-what-you-want versus 4.49% when half the payment went to charity, published in PNAS in 2012 (Gneezy).

"Three field experiments involving PWYW pricing demonstrate that companies can sustain profitability with payments that rely entirely on social preferences." — Gneezy, Gneezy, Riener & Nelson, Pay-what-you-want, identity, and self-signaling in markets, PNAS (2012)

A creator tip page does not need a charity split to use the mechanism behind the PNAS result. Naming what the payment goes toward — "covers an hour of editing," "toward December's gear fund" — gives the custom field a reason to be more than a token amount. See what to put on your tip page to get more tips for a full labeling framework — and if hesitation about asking at all is what's holding the copy back, see is it greedy to have a tip jar.

When should you skip pay-what-you-want and use fixed amounts only?

Skip the open field, or de-emphasize it, when a page needs to move fast for a large volume of low-context visitors — for example, a single "quick support" button linked from a busy bio where most fans will not read supporting copy. Presets alone reduce the decision to a single tap.

Pay-what-you-want does not land above list price for every product: in the 2009 Journal of Marketing field studies, cinema-ticket buyers paid 28.72% less than the regular price while hot-beverage buyers paid 10.62% more (Kim). Fixed amounts only can also make sense when a creator wants Tips to sit predictably below a Creator Service or Personalized Shoutout in a pricing ladder, because an open field adds variance to what a "tip" actually costs a fan. Neither choice is permanent: FanBell's Tips setup supports shifting emphasis between presets and the custom field as an audience changes.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a minimum for a pay-what-you-want tip on FanBell?

Yes — the floor comes from the payment processor. Stripe's API reference states that the minimum charge amount is $0.50 US or the equivalent in the charge currency, so a card payment below that cannot be processed at all. FanBell's Tips offer is paid by card, so the custom-amount field cannot accept a tip under that processor floor.

Do I have to turn off suggested amounts to offer pay-what-you-want?

No. FanBell's Tips offer shows suggested amounts and an open custom-amount field together by default, and the field research supports keeping both: guests shown a reference price in the Kim, Natter and Spann delicatessen study paid an average of 104% of the regular price.

Does a pay-what-you-want tip cost more to receive than a fixed one?

The fee structure is the same either way: a 12% FanBell platform fee only when a fan pays, plus Stripe's published US rate of 2.9% + $0.30 per successful transaction for domestic cards. What changes between a $1 tip and a $20 tip is how much of the payment that fixed $0.30 component consumes, not the rate itself.

Will an open amount field make fans pay less on average?

Not based on the available field research. In three field studies published in the Journal of Marketing in 2009, consumers who set their own price paid on average approximately 86% of their own internal reference price, and prices paid were significantly greater than zero in all three studies (Kim).

How is a pay-what-you-want tip different from Wishlist / Project Support?

A pay-what-you-want tip is a one-time, no-strings payment with no reply or delivery required. Wishlist / Project Support is cash contributed toward a specific, stated creator goal with a visible funding progress bar — Project Support is not the same as an open-ended tip and does not involve shipping a product.

Add a Tips offer with a pay-what-you-want field that fits your audience. Create your free FanBell page